+++
title = "Google Docs Driven Development"
date = "2020-03-23"
description = "Working with repositories stored in prose and folks who love the comments feature."
+++


Do you remember how story problems always take longer than just the pure
maths version? You stew about it and sit in your chair, taking that
standardized test. None of the multiple choice answers look good enough.
How can you choose!

Today finally validated this skill. While I believe it true that
accidental difficulty pops its ugly head in all the time, I have never
seen a group of folks who opt to use. Let me briefly, vaguely explain
how it works. But remain wary; I do not recommend doing this at all.

Google Docs has the following features:

-   version history
-   named versions, ie tags
-   forking (copies)
-   comments
-   chat
-   multi-user synchronous editing
-   centralized backups
-   some kind of
    [CLI](https://google-cl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#stable-release)
    support... XD

This might seem great, but it does lack merging histories back together,
one of the key advantages of using something such as git and its
branching. It also turns into soup, and the code repositories eventually
turn into prose with code blocks. Document comments and chat turn into
massive amounts of meta placed around the code.

The code gets refined, lazily, whenever something needs to run. But
eventually some of the documents become overrun, besieged by prose and
jargon. One I looked at recently had prose, more than an order of
magnitude higher than the actual LOC.
